Presupposition Analysis In Obama's Inaugural Address-from The Perspective Of Presupposition Triggers

Presupposition is an important research issue in linguistics, especially in its subfield of semantics and pragmatics. The first scholar who have explored this research area is the German philosopher Gottlob Frege (1892), and then followed his study, there have been debatings and agreements on the related issues concerning presupposition among scholars, and the more linguists have explored this area, the more they find that there appeared increasing problems that can not be solved at one go. Just as Levinson (1983, P.225) concluded, "presupposition remains, ninety years after Frege's remarks on the subject, still only partially understood, and an important ground for the study of how semantics and pragmatics interact." If you observe language carefully, you will find that the language we use is full of presuppositions, that is, presuppositions are ubiquitous. When communicating with others, the speakers usually take a lot for granted, most of the time people presuppose information. Some of the information that people presupposed is factive, which can reflect several facts and some presuppositions can reflect the state of a previous time period, and some presuppositions are even conterfactual. When we examine the language used in President Barack Obama's inaugural address, we also find that it is full of presuppositions.Lexical items and syntactical constructions that can trigger off presuppositions are called presupposition triggers. Karttunen (1971) has collected thirty-one kinds of presupposition triggers, and Levinson (1983) have mainly discussed thirteen kinds of presupposition triggers chosen from Karttunen's collection. Based on their studies, Yan Huang (2009) has made some modifications on the classification of these presupposition triggers. In this thesis, we find that both Levinson and Yan Huang's classification of presupposition triggers are valuable and meaningful, therefore the study in this thesis will be based on the combination of their views on presupposition triggers.In this thesis, through a statistical study of presupposition triggers, we mainly answer four questions, they are:what types of presupposition triggers are used in President Barack Obama's inaugural address; which presupposition triggers are the most frequently used ones; why some specific presupposition triggers are used more frequently than others and through these triggers what information can be conveyed to us; through a statistical analysis of the presupposition triggers used in President Barack Obama's inaugural address, can this help us to determine the main idea of his address. However, our limitation in this thesis is that the presupposition triggers are detected manually, there may have some omissions or incorrect collections.It is hoped that this thesis will contribute to the further development of the presupposition theory and offer a better understanding of President Barack Obama's inaugural address.